Escaped gaming meme

[mithriltabby]

As I wait for a system that has slowed to a crawl to finish processing so I can diagnose what went wrong with it...

A few things on my “to do” list if ever I find myself in a game with vampires:

• I’ve never actually seen this one done before— though it may have been done to death in venues in which I haven’t gamed— but it would be interesting to see a campaign in which a vampire tries the “hiding in plain sight” method of setting up the Vlad Tepes Memorial Bloodmobile. Just the usual style of bus outfitted to take blood donations, some ghoul servitors to collect blood, give out food and health brochures, etc. Nice and friendly. (Could be a highly amusing way to buy the Herd background in Vampire: the Masquerade.)
• There’s a saying that “you can’t get blood from a turnip”, but it antedates modern genetic engineering. How badly could one upset the balance of power among vampires if an enterprising scientist (or mage) were to arrange a particular breed of blood orange were nourishing to vampires?
• The sequence of events isn’t straightforward to set up, but it’s possible that a vampire, low on blood, involved in a nasty car accident might wind up getting their organs harvested while they’re in torpor. (An organ in torpor might keep amazingly well.) A living human who received an undead organ as a result of some sort of horrible mixup might wind up in a very interesting situation, especially if memories of the previous host start surfacing.

Comments

I did something similar to one of those in our Shadowrun game

[weregamer.livejournal.com]

You may remember it - though I think the party may never have twigged to the fact. He learned actual medicine, and set up a charity clinic near a bad neighborhood. He had to have a good stock of blood on hand for sudden trauma cases, so he had a regular supply of expired blood, which he legitimately had to dispose of. It was only the disposal technique that was not exactly normal.

Re: I did something similar to one of those in our Shadowrun game

[mithriltabby]

I don’t think we ever did figure it out— I have no recollection of it...

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

I recall someone on alt.games.whitewolf doing a writeup of blood oranges, but I can't find it. I don't want to think of how old it would have to be for that.

As for the bloodmobile, the closest I've seen to t hat was a vampire who set himself up with the coroners office. After all, in autopsies the blood has to be drained. Though it may be a bit old and yucky.

Finally, in VTM, I think that vampire organs wither and atrophy to an extent- thus supposedly explaining why vamps are all thin an gorgeous. ;'/ A coroner would probably have quite a shock on opening up a vamp. Though there's definitely other ways to play that- having a vampiric liver could have all kinds of interesting ramifications.

Now, how about organs donated from a werewolf?

[mithriltabby]

Except the heart, though... and just imagine the fun of someone waking up to find they have the heart of a relatively ancient vampire. You’d wind up hunted by the vampire’s blood-bound servitors, but the vampire’s enemies would be perfectly happy to help you survive, in exchange for some favors...

Werewolf and demon organs are another source of fun Fortean mix-ups for games. I get altogether too many great character ideas out of reading the Fortean Times...

[cmccurry.livejournal.com]

I would think that coroners who get a vampire corpse on their tables are persuaded to forget the more unusual findings when they do an exam.

thus supposedly explaining why vamps are all thin an gorgeous.

I like looking at it this way: when the blood of the vampire gets introduced into the bloodstream of someone being changed, it has to burn a lot of energy to finish the process. So it would turn to fat stores in the body for "food."

[mithriltabby]

Once the vampires catch up with the coroner... but organ harvesting needs to be fast so the organs are still viable. All manner of entertaining confusion could occur in a world in which supernatural organs are occasionally available for harvesting...

[cmccurry.livejournal.com]

Do you think that the supernaturally fast healing would affect the normal human body? I have this image of transplant victims getting off the table within a few minutes of the procedure being finished.

[mithriltabby]

I wouldn’t expect it to integrate that fast, but I think the “miraculously fast recovery and completely unexpected lack of need for antirejection drugs” would be exceptional enough...

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

I know you're thinking in terms of VTM (the direct game mechanics of which I'm not familiar with), but I think it might be more fun to look at the possibility of inadvertent transferral of organs in the framework of traditional vampire lore.
Many cultures view the vampire as a body possessed by a devouring, hungry spirit still thisting for life force. By accepting a piece of a body tainted with that spirit, one becomes tainted as well. But how would that manifest? Would the kidney recipient wake up from his operation with the vampire's personality? If you choose to play it that way, a vampire who gets apportioned out into many recipients might have his spirit split among many: corneas, liver, heart, even skin and connective tissue. If a vampire knew he could function without some of these things, he could conceivably check off the appropriate things on his card, play possum, get gutted, and enslave a bunch of people, using his will over his donated body parts.
"Ah, Mrs. Wallace. Enjoying your new kidney, I see? I was quite careful with it. As should you be. I understand you work at a homeless shelter...."

[mithriltabby]

Oh, I’m quite happy to work with all manner of ideas. That’d be a splendid notion for a horror game: the Fault-Tolerant Distributed Redundant Vampire...

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

"Fault-Tolerant Distributed Redundant Vampire..."

That part I don't understand, but I DO understand how fun a horror game would be.... send the players after a bunch of what they think are ghouls or minions that are abducting people to feed to their master-- only to realize that the "ghouls" are unwilling victims themselves who will die/be maimed if the players kill the actual vampire. (imagine your corneas turning to dust all of a sudden)

[mithriltabby]

It’s a joke on technology: you can make a system more resistant to failure if you duplicate the functionality in multiple places, so if one of them goes down, the system itself still functions. The Internet is an example of such a system, though it still gets pretty thoroughly hosed if one of the big centers like MAE East or MAE West falls over.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Depending on the properties of the organs, we may have the possibilty of organized human groups hunting down vamps to harvest their organs. Imagine having an immortal, super-strong set of kidneys, lungs, skin, hair, etc. that pass on some vampiric traits to the new owners.

Of course when I came up with that idea, I( immediately responded with this commercial: "Once there were vast herds of vampires, thundering through the city streets. Until the white man came."

The crying indian commercials had too much of an influence on my formative years.